Posts Tagged ‘memrise’

memrise updates….

Sunday, April 25th, 2021

A bit on the late side but….

December 2020 was the month where I scored incredible 3 million points in month… The screenshot only show 2.9 million points. Either I’ve forgotten the 3m screenshot or I’ve deleted it by mistake. Anyway, it’s not the kind of thing foolishly brag about. Believe it or leave it 🙂

Unfortunately, that took quite a toll… I’ve had a real dip in performance after that for two months but it’s gotten better in the meantime.

Regarding the level, I’m less than 2 million points away from level 18 as of today (20210425) and although I’m still a far cry away from my previous longest streak (1394 as per screenshot above), I’ve dragged most of my enrolled across the 500 day streak threshold again

swissalpo2 is back!

Tuesday, April 28th, 2020

On April 28th 2020 I surpassed swissalpo2 in number of total points on memrise. He was my long-term goal (and secret rival). Secret as in he probably didn’t know about me pursuing him although he follows me.

He’s a pro subscriber so I started to get worried when two months ago his activity fell to zero. So in that sense it was really easy to bridge the last 4 million points that separated us. Standing still target…

With the COVID-19 pandemic going on, there’s no telling what happes to other people. So I started to get really worried. But just when I decided to write this post, he came back and put in 9000 points in one day. swissalpo2 is alive.

Welcome back!

Memrise: new point record in March 2020

Saturday, April 4th, 2020

I previously posted a screenshot of a 2 * 10^6 points monthly score in Memrise.

This time (March 2020), I was able to surpass myself… 2’240’000 points. But it wasn’t all fun, it’s turning into hard work to score that many points. Getting up 5 o’clock every morning, three sessions a day… hmpf. I know, there are other people getting even higher scores, but I also have other interests.

March 2020 was fortunate circumstances, which helped a lot…. one week alone, 31 calendar days… it all helped.

Memrise – good news and bad news

Saturday, December 14th, 2019

Memrise…. I’ve posted several times about it already.

The good news is, I crossed the 60 million points line. It’s just a number but still… quite a high number and I’ve been adding at least 1 million points per month for at least the last 24 months. Sometimes something as simple as perseverance can result in progress.

The bad news is on December 7th 2019 I lost *all* my streaks, probably due to a bug. I did the daily points required to keep the streaks alive on all 14 or 15 courses I’m doing at the moment, so imagine my shock when I wake up and my precious 1394 days streak is gone. Since the streaks of all course were reset that cannot possibly have been my mistake. Contacting support was useless (there was a reply but it was not helpful).

To add insult to injury, in the latest version Memrise I get stupid notifications like “Keep your awesome streak alive” but the highest streaks I have since the incident is 8. Go figure if I’m happy or not. Since I believe in voting with my money, I will not pay for the full subscription anymore.

A new monthly record-high memrise score

Saturday, June 1st, 2019

In May 2019 I accumulated a cool two million points on memrise. A screenshot will follow later. This is the first time I crossed that particular threshold, usually I end a month between 1.5m and 1.8m points.

According to the stats (I’m a premium member for the time being), I spent 31h in May learning – which is probably correct but this is the “learning” stat. A big chunk of those points come from repetitions which are not included in that stat. So the overall time spent on memrise in May was between two and three times that much (31 days multiplied by on average 1.8h).

Actually, the same goes for the streak stat – the streak only counts learning events – but only on the website. If one day you do only repetitions (even if you do 10’000 of them), your streak is gone.
The app on the other hand adds to your streak if you reach your daily goal.

For this reason, my streak on the website if around 270 now but in the app it’s around 1210.

Update 20190611: I promised you a screenshot, here it is:

a cool two million points in one month ^_^

Another memrise threshold crossed… (two, actually)

Monday, May 6th, 2019

Last week I passed the incredible landmark of 50’000’000 points on memrise, my most often used app for learning languages and vocabulary.

I think I started using memrise five or six year ago so I must have made on average between 8’000’000 and 10’000’000 points per year. Go me!

During the same years I’ve gone though all the redesigns that memrise has taken, not all of them for the better (honestly, none of them were really for the better). The last re-design (“let’s do away with the rockets and remove most of the colours too”) is kind of an eye-bleacher. Most of the buttons or icons unfortunately now follow the “flat” design which does not work pretty much anywhere (iOS, Windows 10, LibreOffice) but because Apple started this crap, everyone seems to be eager to follow suit.

Together with crossing the line of 50’000’000 points, I’ve also surpassed a mempal I’ve been following for a long time: Donnerwoelkchen. When I first followed her (doing a HSK level 6 course), she was roughly 25’000’000+ points ahead so I promised myself to catch up to her in points before she reaches the 50*10^6 – I made it work but it was close… she really pushed the envelope in the last two months so I had to make a bigger-than-usual effort.
Also, I’ve unfollowed her since 😉

Although it is unclear if I will stick around memrise to do another 50’000’000 points, I’ll forge ahead for the time being…

Keep on learnin’!

My first self-created course on memrise.com

Friday, September 28th, 2018

I’ve been posting about memrise on a couple of occasions. This time rather than bragging how many words I’ve learned and how many points I made, I created my own course:

https://www.memrise.com/course/2053021/qian-shui-shi-shi-yan-nodan-yu/

It’s a Japanese -> English course supposed to help you with vocabulary required to help passing the Japanese dive theory test called 潜水士試験

(I have no idea why the URL uses the Mandarin pinyin pronounciation for the test… I’ve inputted Japanese kanji – I also opened a help call with memrise but no reaction so far)

Creating the course was not difficult but you need to prepare the list(s) ahead and put the colums in the right order if you want to mass-import the lists.

Good luck, give it a try yourself (the course as well as creating your own course ^^)

A memrise milestone…

Wednesday, July 18th, 2018

Recently surpassed a streak of 10^3 consecutive days of learning on memrise… don’t think I’m going to be able to keep this up until I hit 10^4… and guess what, no rewards or points or anything for it.

Here’s a screenshot:

Which also means that slightly more than 1000 days ago, the app and the website didn’t work and I lost a 350ish day streak. Nobody ever said sorry about that then.

Schnapszahl* anniversary on memrise

Monday, April 10th, 2017

I’m a cautiosly avid user of memrise (memrise.com) – every tool has its advantages and disadvantages. So far, memrise has worked well for me and this weekend I was able to celebrate a 555 day streak (everyday continous learning). Something to be a little proud of.

This means two things:

  1. I have used a computer/tablet/smartphone for 555 days straight
  2. 556 days ago, the memrise app login and the website were not available, I just could not login which ruined my previous 300+ streak. Thanks a lot, memrise. By the way, there was never an apology or even an explanation about the outage. Well, it’s a free tool so I guess I can’t complain.

*What’s a Schnapszahl, you ask? Apparently there’s no direct translation in English. It’s defined as a number which consists of several equal numbers such as the above 555. Before trying to find a translation and checking the definition I though it also included patterns e.g. 737737, but this could be a regional difference.

Does memrise help you remember stuff?

Monday, August 29th, 2016

I use a couple of memorization tools…. anymemo, memrise, mnemosyne. They all have their strengths and weaknesses. In this post, I would like to divulge my opinion on memrise.

Overall, I have been using memrise for app. 553 days. The app encourages streaks – continous days of usage. For one set of vocabulary, I’m on my 333rd consecutive day – before that, the website was down so I lost my previous 200 or so day streak.

By the way, no one at memrise has ever apologized for that one day of downtime nor was there ever any explanation posted on the webiste. Shame, shame….

Memrise comes in two options: You can either login to the website memrise.com and learn facts and vocabulary there or you can install the memrise app.

Please keep in mind that I’m using memrise to learn Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hebrew. The relevance will be clear after the next paragraph…

The algorithm behind either version is the same – the main difference is the input and its configuration. On the website, you can choose to type vocabulary by using your physical keyboard whereas in the app, memrise provides an onscreen keyboard. Why does that make a difference?

On my pc/laptop, I have succesfully configured Mandarin and Japanese input for which I can use the latin alphabet as a basis. To type 漢字 in Japanese, I switch to the Japanese input and type “kanji” (Enter). The same principle works for Mandarin.

Korean on the other hand uses a totally different keyboard and so far I have not found a latin alphabet-bases input configuration. A colleague uses a self-made paper layout on top of his physical keyboard. Until I have to get really close and intimate with Korean, I will remain on the current low-key configuration, thank you.

As for Hebrew which is a right-to-left language (totally freaks me out in vocabulary lists in Excel), I don’t know. I’m just learning some basic words and phrases for the time being, so I have not looked into any input methods on my pc/laptop.

The exercises on memrise come in several patterns, but this can widely differ from course by course, which are contributed by memrise members. Naturally, the quality of the courses can also differ…

Most courses come with cards in English–><foreign_language> and the opposite (<foreign_language>->English). The “better” courses provided audio files for the <foreign_language> cards which can be really helpful for any foreign language, especially tonal languagues.

The “written” cards come in the following variety: Typing, recognizing and selecting. All in all, a good variety.

Before a card is marked as learned, you have to repeat it appr. six or seven times in learning mode. Afterwards it is moved to the “learned” heap and reappears according to a long-time memorization algorithm, similar to supermemo, anymemo, mnemosye and so on.

The downsides of memrise (the app, not the website) is the development. I was invited to participate as beta tester for memrise but after watching the google+ group for a couple of weeks, I decided to leave the group and not update memrise if I can avoid it.

The guys behind memrise basically make the same mistake all developers seem to make…. features over fixes and implemenation of features that do not make sense. I can understand the rationale behind this, but first of all I want a working app not new features all the time.

Also, there is considerable lack of communication about development and features. I have not seen a properly maintained list of bugs (open, in work, fixes). Frankly, the whole process of reporting bugs until a fix is implemented seems not very mature. A lot of users in the groups simply state “it’s not working pls fix it”. The more communicative users at least state their type of mobile phone, what version of ios or android and how to recreate the bug.

If you just are looking for a different way to learn vocabulary, check out memrise – at least I think it’s a good way to learn.